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02/11/2013 07:25 am ETUpdated
Apr 13, 2013

10 Reasons Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think (PHOTOS)

By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

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It might seem like a challenge to find genius in a species that will happily drink out of a toilet bowl. Forget Shakespearean sonnets or e=mc2, the smartest thing a dog does on any given day might include licking every wrapper in the trash or chasing their own tail until they fall over.

However, we have never been more sure that dogs are geniuses. We have learned more about how dogs think in the past decade than we have in the last century. How they are geniuses is not always obvious, but uncovering the answers is all part of the fun. The full story of this journey is in our new book The Genius of Dogs, and if you are curious, you can find the genius in your own dog here. Until then, here are a few cases of canine cleverness that may surprise you.

The pooch drooling on the sofa may look less impressive than a wolf howling at the moon, and for years people assumed that domestication dulled an animal’s intelligence because they couldn’t survive in the wilderness as well as their wild relatives. However, we now know that far from making dogs dumber, domestication gave them a very special kind of intelligence – they communicate and interact with us in ways that are similar to human infants. This social savvy has made them the most successful mammal on the planet, besides us.
<em>Photo courtesy of flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/markhillary/2187818073/sizes/l/">markhillary.</a></em>